Sunshine Week: Teacher misconduct can escape detection

Criminal background checks for teachers are intended to prevent adults who are sexually motivated to abuse children from gaining access to students, but lawmakers and child advocates say the checks alone are not effective, and more needs to be done to keep kids safe.

“Sometimes people feel that if an individual passes the fingerprint test (and) the CORI check, that they’re fine,” said Jetta Bernier, who serves as executive director for the advocacy group Massachusetts Citizens for Children. “The problem is that the vast majority of those who abuse children have never been arrested or convicted.”

In recent years, a handful of instances of sexual misconduct by employees at Cape Cod schools has underscored the limited scope of the checks, a lack of transparency into investigations of school employees, and other loopholes in state law that make it possible for teachers who have engaged in sexual misconduct to move from school district to school district without detection.

Jacob Stapledon, community education and outreach coordinator for the Cape-based advocacy center Children’s Cove, described the issue as a nationwide problem.

Stapledon said he knew of several situations where a person had committed an offense while employed with one school district, but because the investigation was not substantiated or prosecuted, information about the incident was not communicated, and the person was able to gain employment at another district that was unaware of the allegations.

“They left that area because people knew it was an issue, and they went to another area ... where there was no notification, there was no information,” Stapledon said. “In fact, there was not even public record, and then it happened again.”

Massachusetts law requires school employees and bus drivers to submit to a name-based Criminal Offender Record Information check, which returns information about arraignments held against a person within the state of Massachusetts. They also must pass a fingerprint-based check that returns information about arrests made in Massachusetts and possibly in other states.

But states have varying policies regarding what is reported and whether offenses may be sealed, which translates to a lack of consistency in what is included on the report from state to state.

Children’s Cove director Stacy Gallagher said school hiring policies should go beyond the bare-minimum requirements by calling for broader national background checks and sex offender registry checks. Schools also should spend a serious amount of time conducting their own research on candidates being considered for roles that have contact with children, she said.

“You can’t just do a state CORI,” she said. “People have been out of the state and have had history in other states.”

A strong hiring policy could prevent sexual predators from even applying to a school, according to Stapledon.

“Individuals who have been caught, who’ve been arrested, who have gone on record, they talk about the fact that they look for places that don’t have solid policies and procedures,” he said. “They look at the handbooks — because you can find them all online — they look at that information and they would specifically target organizations with weak policy and procedure.”

Personnel issues

Equally important is the handling and communication of investigations into teacher misconduct.

In March 2016, Greg Giardi resigned as an English teacher and assistant athletic director at Sturgis Charter Public School in Hyannis after he was investigated for inappropriate conduct with a student.

Barnstable police subpoenaed phone records as they investigated communication between Giardi and the student but did not press charges. At the time, the school’s directors declined to comment on details of the resignation, saying it was a confidential personnel issue.

Giardi’s license was revoked in 2018, after he failed to respond to a probable cause letter from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, meaning he will not be eligible to teach again in a Massachusetts public school. Private schools and other child-serving organizations, however, are not mandated to require that teachers hold a state license.

State law currently requires that teachers report to the Department of Children and Families if they have reasonable cause to believe a child has been abused or neglected. And, if a teacher has been fired for cause or has resigned after being found guilty of a crime or committing gross misconduct, administrators are required to make a report to the education department. That department offers a searchable database where the public can see the status of teachers' licenses, but the department does not release any information about the fact that a teacher has been investigated unless the investigation results in a license being revoked.

In many cases, allegations of sexual abuse either cannot be substantiated by the Department of Children and Families or do not result in successful prosecution, giving individual school districts discrepancy over how to handle the situation.

Bernier, who also directs MassKids’ Enough Abuse campaign to prevent sexual abuse in schools, said when schools are faced with a potential scandal over allegations of misconduct, they sometimes opt to sign a nondisclosure agreement in exchange for the resignation of the accused teacher.

“It’s not infrequent where the school says, ‘We’ll give you a good reference, we’ll give you a nice severance package,” she said. “It’s a confidentiality agreement to basically keep quiet.”

State personnel laws also offer protection for teachers accused of sexual misconduct, because they discourage school administrators from handing over negative information about a former employee seeking a job with a new school district.

“Misconduct and loss of employment is an organizational issue, and therefore, it may be a complete internal issue, which may be resolved without an official written record,” Stapledon said via email. “As such, any individual may choose to exclude that work history from their resume. In this way, other organizations may never find out about the 'firing' and hire an individual accused of misconduct unknowingly.”

Pending legislation

But two bills pending on Beacon Hill aim to make it tougher for teachers who have been investigated for sexual misconduct to move from one school district to another without detection.

An Act Relative to Preventing the Sexual Abuse of Children and Youth and another bill known as the Shield Act were filed in January by state Sen. Joan Lovely, D-Salem, and are co-sponsored by about a dozen other lawmakers, including Sen. Julian Cyr, D-Truro. If the bills pass, Massachusetts will join eight other states that have adopted similar laws.

“Keeping children safe at school — in every way we can — is part of the basic social contract we make with parents and families about educating their children,” Cyr said.

Cyr referred to the case against Noah Campbell-Halley, the 36-year-old Harwich man who was in his fifth year of teaching computer technology at Stony Brook Elementary School in Brewster when he was arrested in March 2018.

Campbell-Halley was indicted in August by a Barnstable County grand jury on five counts of rape of a child, eight counts of aggravated indecent assault and battery on a child under 14, one count of assault and battery on a child under 14 and two counts of intimidation of a witness.

According to police reports, two first-graders told a forensic interviewer that Campbell-Halley would take them to “the dark room” off the computer lab where he would show them explicit videos and touch them inappropriately or have them touch each other or him. A third boy interviewed told of watching videos in the room but did not disclose any sexual activity.

In 2010, before being hired by Stony Brook, Campbell-Halley had worked as a preschool teacher at Cape Cod Children’s Place in Eastham and was investigated for an alleged indecent assault and battery on a 4-year-old.

Attorney Bruce Bierhans, who represents Cape Cod Children’s Place, said the 2010 investigation involved the Eastham Police Department, the Department of Children and Families, the Department of Early Education and Children’s Cove, and the Eastham center cooperated fully with the agencies involved.

“As a result of those investigations, there were no positive findings made,” Bierhans said.

Campbell-Halley remained at Cape Cod Children’s Place through 2012, when he left to take the job at Stony Brook, according to Bierhans.

Because of personnel laws, information about the allegations was not passed on to the Brewster school.

“No information was passed along, because it would have been completely inappropriate for them as a matter of law to do that,” Bierhans said.

Cyr described the 2018 incident as having “rocked the Brewster community and the school community Capewide,” and said it’s clear more needs to be done to protect children.

“I think this is an example where, particularly, one way to do more is to make sure teachers who’ve been accused of sexual abuse or misconduct cannot easily find a job in the next district, by stopping this practice of ‘pass the trash,'” he said.

A key component of the Shield Act involves improving transparency into investigations of teacher misconduct.

Under the bill, schools would be mandated to require that applicants for positions in direct contact with children provide a written statement disclosing whether they have been the subject of an abuse or sexual misconduct investigation by any employer or agency, although exceptions will be made for investigations that are inconclusive or determine that the allegations were false.

The bill also would require the hiring school to request the same information from past employers, who would then have 120 days to disclose it. Disclosed information would be exempt from the state’s public records laws, according to the bill.

The consent loophole

Lovely’s second bill aims to close a loophole in state law that does nothing to prohibit school employees from engaging in sexual relations with students over 16.

In 2015, John Tierney, who at the time was a 35-year-old math teacher at Mattacheese Middle School in West Yarmouth, was found to be having sex with a 16-year-old Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School student.

Sixteen is the age of consent in Massachusetts. Tierney was not charged with a crime and was permitted to continue teaching until he resigned more than six months after the investigation began, despite the confirmation of the sexual nature of the relationship.

Because there are no laws requiring allegations against teachers to be reported even to school committees, the D-Y Regional School Committee was not aware that a teacher was being investigated until the probe was reported in the news.

Tierney surrendered his teaching license in 2015, and in 2017, the committee voted unanimously to prohibit teachers and other staff from having sex with students — a rule that seems like common sense, but is not codified in state law.

Lovely’s bill would make it legally impossible for a person under the age of 19 to consent to sexual relations with a school employee or contractor who is older than 21. The age minimum would increase to 22 for a person with special needs. Under the bill, teachers and certain other professionals who work with minors could be sentenced to as many as five years in prison and fined up to $10,000 if found guilty of having sexual relations with a student who could not legally consent due to age.

Stapledon called the issue of consent “tremendously complicated.”

“It’s hard to tease out that piece of what is consent versus what has been a behavior that perhaps could’ve started a long time ago through what’s commonly referred to as grooming,” he said.

The Shield Act also would require the department of education to draft a model policy aimed at preventing sexual abuse. All schools and youth-serving organizations would then be required to adopt their own policies based on the model and ensure that employees are regularly trained in preventing, identifying and reporting child sexual abuse.

Even if the bills pass, it will likely be years before they take effect. Both have been assigned to the Joint Committee on Education, according to Cyr. The committee has until early February 2020 to hold a public hearing and render a decision. If the measures advance, they would likely be assigned to another committee for further analysis, Cyr said.

Lovely said she plans to continue pushing for passage of the bills.

“We’re just continuing to expose children to unnecessary trauma,” she said. “So it’s very important to me and many of my colleagues to be able to come up with, again, proper reporting, disclosure and training. We’re going to continue to work to put these supports in place, these safety measures in place, to protect kids.”

— Follow Kristen Young on Twitter: @KristenCCT.

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